Brush Mountain Data Center

Mission Critical Data Back-Up

This post appeared on Anne Giles Clelland's Inside VT KnowledgeWorks.

In Before Brush Mountain Data Center There Was No RAS, I wrote about Doug Mauer's coining of a new IT acronym.

Fully appreciating a new IT acronym takes a little bit of “you had to be there.”

I was "there" - in business in Web 1.0.  Remember "robust" and "ubiquitous"? 

In addition to terms like those, Microsoft certifications were all the rage then - in Tampa, anyway - and considered the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in network administration.  The certifications were exam-based and sequential, so a friend and I bought the first thick exam prep text from Amazon.com, studied a certain number of chapters solo, then met weekly to discuss LANs and WANs.

I unearthed the first text for the first exam, Networking Essentials.  On the inside cover, in my earnest handwriting, is my name and the date:  August 1998.

I took and passed the Networking Essentials exam and the NT Server 4.0 exam, enough to become a “Microsoft Certified Professional,” the coveted MCP - one of those IT acronyms - but I didn’t feel passionate about continuing.  To quote Jim Flowers, director of VT KnowledgeWorks, it didn't "light me up."  My friend earned many sets of letters, including MCP and MCSE, but after she let me help her build a server from a box of parts, I always think of her as A+.

What also lingers from those days is the imperative of data back-up and data protection.

By 1998, most small and medium businesses had already been through storing mission critical data on their brand new, top-of-the-line stand alone computers, having the hard drives fail, and losing all their data.  They had learned to back up data on floppy disks, then Zip disks, then tape drives, even on external hard drives.

In the lightning capital of of the nation, Tampa, businesses would learn from electrical surges, hurricanes, and fires that storing backed up data on-site was a no-no.  They would tell their stories at networking meetings and everyone would "Tsk-tsk" and say, “We really should look into storing our data off-site, too.”  But then they would decide something else was more mission critical than mission critical data - and what were the odds of their businesses getting hit by lightning anyway? – and leave that mission unaccomplished.

Here I am in business again, this time in Web 2.0, and being reminded by Doug Mauer of Brush Mountain Data Center of the data management and data security best practices I learned a decade ago.

If I lose my data, I lose my business.

That's mission critical.

Thanks for the reminder, Doug, and thanks for providing mission-critical, business-saving services.

Brush Mountain Data Center, LLC, specializes in data security and remote data backup services.  Offering server co-location and offsite disaster recovery protection, Brush Mountain Data Center serves as your company’s “data vault in the mountains."

A NAS and a RAS - The Benefits of Both

This post appeared on Anne Giles Clelland's Inside VT KnowledgeWorks.

I found Doug Mauer’s Turn Your NAS into a RAS a very clever explanation for the services offered by his VT KnowledgeWorks member company Brush Mountain Data Center.

And in the overflowing universe of IT acronyms, in which competition is fierce, Doug Mauer has created an elegant, new set of letters.

Before Brush Mountain Data Center, there was no RAS.

Well, except for Microsoft's RAS, Remote Access Service, but that's so Web 1.0.

During Web 1.0, I very responsibly backed up my mission-critical, small business data on floppy disks once per month and stored them in a safety deposit box at the bank.

Now, during Web 2.0, I back up my mission-critical, VT KnowledgeWorks member company wild and crazy start-up data in an entrepreneurially predictable fashion - not often enough - on a Seagate Free Agent Desktop USB Portable Hard Drive.  It’s the equivalent of a Network Attached Storage device - a NAS.  But I can see it sitting right there on my bookshelf.  My data is not stored off-site.

Brush Mountain Data Center has set up a way to turn my NAS into a RAS. 

Mauer writes in his Brush Mountain Data Center blog, “As a client of Brush Mountain Data Center, for instance, a company can buy an inexpensive commercially available Network Attached Storage (NAS) device and place it in our Data Center for $100 per month."

"This Network Attached Storage, or NAS, is then configured to appear as a local NAS but is securely attached via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel over the Internet. This arrangement can be thought of as a 'Remote Attached Storage (RAS) device.'  So you turn your NAS into a RAS and get the benefits of both.”

Nice, eh?  I buy a NAS and put it in Brush Mountain Data Center.  It looks like my data is still “attached” and on my bookshelf, but it’s really stored off-site, remotely, as a RAS in Brush Mountain Data Center’s “data vault in the mountains.”

Let me see if I understand this.  In doing business with a company led by a guy IT-savvy enough to generate a new IT acronym, I get to extend my responsible business practices?  I protect myself through protecting my company’s data and I protect my ability to serve my clients by having immediate access to that data should anything falter here at mission control?

Remote data backup at Brush Mountain Data Center of my pictures of my cat - I mean of my small and medium business (SMB) start-up's mission critical business data?

I gotta have that.

Brush Mountain Data Center, LLC, specializes in data security and remote data backup services.  Offering server co-location and offsite disaster recovery protection, Brush Mountain Data Center serves as your company’s “data vault in the mountains."

Turn Your NAS into a RAS

Thanks, Kibbe, for letting us know about Backup Review in your comment on our post  on making a Data Plan on Handshake 2.0. It is helpful for companies to have a good reference point to start their research into data backup services offered out there.

A company lives and dies by its data these days, and having a stranger get  your files, as noted in Backup Review' s HP Upline Online Backup Solution Review, was really not cool.  It appears as if most of these service providers are focusing on consumer level services, inexpensive with minimal to no support, and no Service Level Agreements (SLA).

A great deal of these "online" backup services have unknown security issues which gets particularly dicey with data for small and medium businesses (SMB).  Public access to a company's files is not something that small businesses would find attractive.

A chance always exists that a large, Internet-based, open service would be compromised, or even disappear, as did the HP Upline service last year for a few days. This can kill a business which needs access to files 24/7/365. The services may also require additional proprietary software of unknown security or function, which is a potential security hole and against many internal IT policies.

At Brush Mountain Data Center (BMDC), we have identified and focus primarily on a slightly higher-end market place in order for clients to be assured of bullet-proof data security. We provide secure network/data center "parking places" and services to small business clients  wherein they can locate their own, or lease, dedicated remote servers for off-site redundancy of their mission critical data.

As a client of Brush Mountain Data Center, for instance, a company can buy an inexpensive commercially available Network Attached Storage (NAS) device and place it in our Data Center for $100 per month.

This Network Attached Storage, or NAS, is then configured to appear as a local NAS but is securely attached via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel over the Internet. This arrangement can be thought of as a "Remote Attached Storage (RAS) device."  So you turn your NAS into a RAS and get the benefits of both.

This is just a bit more expensive than bulk Internet services, or even those "something for nothing" promises of many of the backup service providers. By implementing the concept of a remote attached storage device, however, companies can feel much more at ease as they are more in control of their important data.

Brush Mountain Data Center offers this service and others in many different levels to provide customers with as much hands on control as they desire.

We recommend that small businesses keep these points in mind when developing their overall Data Plan.